


vice and failure

by beeclaws



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-18
Updated: 2017-03-18
Packaged: 2018-10-07 05:38:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10353393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beeclaws/pseuds/beeclaws
Summary: ‘Allow yourself some vice and failure. We'll still love you just the same.’Pike, and the woman she never let herself be.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Summary quote from Percy's letter, read in episode 69.

Pike followed her family down into the Underdark, and opened up a fissure in her holy symbol. They slew a beholder, besieged a city of monsters. She slit a man’s throat and watched black blood run over her hands.  
  
Out in the light she knelt on the temple floor and tried to draw herself closer to Sarenrae. She focused, quietly, the way she does each morning to bring her magic to the ready and tried, for hours, to feel nothing but regret. To put aside her pride and her justifications and bow before the being that made her who she is. The world falls away and for a time the ground seems to rock like waves, and she has to fight to remember that she is no longer a lost girl on a tall ship, angry and scarred – she focuses, over and over, on the stone floor, the symbol around her neck, the blood she spilled.  
  
When it breaks, she hears the whisper of a laugh, and all her effort melts away. She hears words of forgiveness and basks in the familiar strangeness of being seen, truly seen, by something grand and glorious and far, far away.  
  
The crack seals over. She stands up and feels joy bubbling up in her chest, wants to laugh at the stares and whispers of the other clerics, wants to grab their hands and tell them that there is nothing to fear anymore. Instead she turns to Vax, and begins the work of healing all over again.  
  
…  
  
Pike carries on, and the feeling fades. The moments she is in Sarenrae’s light have always been precious partly for their rarity. In between, she must go on alone and do it with grace.  
  
They take to the skies to deliver the horn to Vasselheim, and up in the air an unease starts to take hold of her. Feeling her friends’ eyes on her in battle calls up the pressure of the underground. She finds herself trying to stand straighter, to seem unhurt and unworried even though the trouble has passed.  
  
She meditates, trying to summon up calm from stillness, and for just a moment she is visited by a brief certainty that terrible things are coming for her family, and that she will not be with them when they do.  
  
They reach Vasselheim and K’varn’s horn is hidden away. Outside the city they find a ruin, and a handful of people trying to put it back together. Pike can feel the question coming before the woman begins to speak, and as she is asked to stay she is caught by relief and guilt all in one motion.  
  
Pike stays. Vox Machina goes on.  
  
…  
  
The air here is thin and cold, far from the heat and dust of the Underdark. Far, too, from the bite of salt out to sea.  
  
Pike sets to work turning a ruin to a temple, happiest when she can stop directing and planning and simply build, just bare hands and cold stone. Being away from her family is strange and familiar all at once, so much so that for a moment after waking she finds herself expecting the creaking of wood, the rolling of the tide.  
  
She does not pray often now - less than when she was a young initiate in Westruun, less than anyone would expect of her - but she makes two requests, as humbly as she can manage: that she will find the same kind of clarity she found out on the waves, and that her family will still be there when she is finished.  
  
She goes days and weeks without battle or healing, hardly knowing which spells to bring to the ready each morning. Still, she finds herself reaching for her holy symbol as she works, running her thumb over the surface, finding it whole and resolute each time. She does not know what she could do in this quiet place to rend it apart, to cast off the forgiveness she was granted, but the need to take hold and make sure remains.  
  
…  
  
She runs back to Vox Machina before the work is done, finds them both changed and exactly the same. There are marks on their shoulders now, a contract she had no part of, but they still love and need her. Always need. But she chose to build, so she says goodbye all over again, glad that no one asks why, that no one points out that any servant of Sarenrae could assist with the temple whereas Vox Machina only has one.  
  
Back in the frost, back to the rising walls, she cannot shake the fear that she is dooming them with her absence. She dreams of monsters below and the sounds they make as they die. She had never minded the cold but now it seems to leech into her during the night, slowing her hands. She makes small fires on nights when she abandons sleep, staring at the flames and wondering which of her friends is keeping watch somewhere far away.  
  
…  
  
She hikes a few miles from the half-built temple, climbing higher until an ache sets deep into her legs and she can see nothing but snow-laden trees stretching out below the ridge. Strangely, it feels easier to try and reach Sarenrae out here, out of sight of the thing she is building in her name.  
  
Looking down at the forest she is reminded of setting out to find Grog all those years ago. Of walking through the woods before Vox Machina, before any of it, young and unburdened and utterly alone. She closes her eyes for a moment and tries to feel it all over again: worrying for Grog, knowing nothing of what would come next, but still finding a moment of elation in walking new ground.  
  
Pulling herself back to the present, Pike lays down her pack and sits cross-legged on the frozen ground. It has been so many years since she first heard Sarenrae’s call and she still feels unsure of how to go about these things. _Talk to me,_ she thinks, watching dark-winged birds circle against the sky. _I think maybe you were wrong. Show me you weren’t wrong._  
  
The breeze picks up slightly; now that she’s still the sting of it is worse. The birds she was watching fly over a hill and out of sight.  
  
Pike sighs into the silence, hand worrying at the symbol around her neck. She is a healer, and so she knows that easing pain requires you to find the source. To name your ailment. If she had to name hers, the fault lying below, it is an inability to find permanence. A restlessness like the shifting tide. She has always seen the value in being one thing and doing it with everything in you, something Grog has always done so effortlessly, and yet she wanders back and forth, leaving people behind each time she goes.  
  
She had thought her purpose was in making whole what was broken. It had seemed more like a discovery than a decision, the natural consequence of Pike and her kind hands. She inherited Wilhand’s gentleness, his quiet defiance of a legacy of shadows and lies, and used it to become a vessel of Sarenrae’s light. It is a good story. It is the one she thinks her friends would tell, if they were asked who she was. It would be easy to say that that is all there is of her. But she has left her friends behind three times over now, and it is growing harder to pretend there isn’t a problem.  
  
So there is the other side. The things she has done. The blood she spilled without wondering if it was truly the necessary second side of the coin to Sarenrae's forgiveness: that those who will not repent must die without pain and without fanfare.  
  
More and more, she is resentful of the things she can do and the fearful of those she can’t. She has seen clerics who raise up the dead to do their will, who rain radiant fire down on those who would oppose them, who spread necrosis across their skin. She has felt the potential of it a hundred times, buried even within her kindest spells, and turned away. The bargain of her powers is that toying with her nature is never without consequence: any step taken could mean her holy symbol turning to dust in her fingers, and yet she worries at it like a broken tooth.  
  
She has failed to find a place she can rest, to find a cause she can fight for without vanishing days or weeks later. And deeper than that, she has failed to be known, failed to be heard, even by those who love her most. Perhaps even by Sarenrae.  
  
Pike lets her holy symbol drop, and looks down at the frozen ground. She wants her world back. She wants her family safe and glorious. She should not be here.  
  
…  
  
Pike returns to the temple to find a letter from Allura. She scans the words quickly: Vox Machina have been ousted from the council, accused of attacking nobles though they insist they were attacking monsters.  
  
The letter falls from her hands. The air seems thinner than ever as her mind races. The heaviness she had felt when thinking of her friends seems to grow and clarify: she feels certain, suddenly, that somewhere they are walking on cursed ground. She is their healer and she left them to wander in the dark.  
  
She thinks of Percy, who keeps so much of himself hidden away that she almost forgets to worry for him. There is a trace of smoke in the air, a grit like the underground. She should be with them. They are a part of her, nothing she has done can undo that. She would feel it if it were too late. Pike reaches for her holy symbol, no spell in mind, and as she takes hold the room before her vanishes.  
  
For a moment there is only breathless heat. She sees the sparkle of rain burning away as it touches something radiant. It takes a moment to make out that she is looking at her own hands. She looks up to a forest of the dead, rising and shambling. Sound kicks in and she can hear the creaking of bone, the sizzling of the rain against her skin and, somewhere far off, voices she would know anywhere. She takes a breath and there is the muted cold of Vasselheim, the storming night and, beneath it all, a warmth that is entirely her own. She starts running.  
  
…  
  
They take back Whitestone. Pike tries to help Percy and severs one of the threads she finds ensnaring his heart. She is still there when those that remain rise up with claws of smoke: still there, too, when it is dead and banished. She has never been more aware of what an absentee healer she has become, but it is good to be a part of their victories again, to have left something undeniably better than when they found it.  
  
Her projection isn’t perfect: when it cuts out she finds herself alone in her room at the temple, sore and freezing. When it fades for the last time, she can tell it is finished. The need to be at their side settles. As she gets up to start a fire and go on with her work, it occurs to her that what she just did is magic she has never seen or heard of. Teleportation is one thing but she breathed in two worlds at once. She smiles, softly, as the fire begins to rise.  
  
…  
  
Pike goes home, and Emon topples around her. Destruction, when it comes, looks unreal, and almost beautiful. She has a moment to take it in, as Allura’s tower falls oddly slow, debris arcing across the sky. Things happen very quickly, after that.  
  
They make it back to the keep alive, and Pike isn’t sure if she should be surprised. They have learned enough to run from monsters like this, if not how to stop them from burning their city.  
  
She loses herself, for a time, in the work in front of her. People are bleeding and burned, and it is hours before she stops for long enough to remember Wilhand, to wonder if the dragons flying east have found their way to her first home.  
  
They flee to Whitestone, and Pike stays with the wounded. She heals and heals and her friends return waylaid by a heaviness none of them will name. They leave, she stays, she follows them to a camp of refugees from her sundered home. She learns, in pieces, that they are seeking vestiges, seeking creatures who might know of them, seeking anyone and anything that might help.  
  
In the Sphinx’s lair chaos builds faster than she would have believed, and Pike is out of practice in everything but easing wounds. Through the dim she realises that Grog is gone, tether and all, and rushes to the portal with no plan in mind. A blade sinks into her gut and there is no sound but her own breath. She clutches the hilt and sees the chain attached to it, feels the weight on the other end cause it to shift hideously, and holds on. Seconds drag on in agony and just as Grog begins to emerge Pike hears a soft laugh, a voice in her head that is not her own.  
  
Outside, as they rest, she heals the wound and for a moment the pain flares brighter, almost burning. And then it fades and the scar is just a mark, crossing over the thin, dark line circling her waist.  
  
By her side one of the twins gasps, and she looks up to see Grog falling into the snow. They bring him back, and talk him down and Pike determinedly does not think for minutes, hours, as long as she can stand.  
  
They are changing. Grog, Vax, Vex. She was fooling herself to believe that they weren’t. She looked away and the topography of their wounds shifted. One day she might return and find them beyond her help – breathless, cold. These things are not without consequence.  
  
…  
  
For a while, Pike doesn’t leave. She walks through her old home and is struck by the quiet, as though the whole city is trying to hide from view. She had heard people say that your childhood home always seems smaller when you return, but Westruun seems sprawling as ever, and horribly exposed.  
  
They find Grog’s old herd and time drags out sickeningly as the battle rages on, and there are seconds that feel like hours where she cannot see a single one of her friends. They survive, somehow, and she and Percy sing a child back to life. She finds Wilhand, and gets to see the look on his face when she tells him she has slain dragons.  
  
They slay another dragon, and in the warmth of the baths at Scanlan’s mansion Pike thinks that victory is unreal, too, that her days with Vox Machina are bordered with impossible things.  
  
…  
  
She dreams she is standing on the roof of Greyskull Keep, only before her there is no city but a great, black sea, and a rolling storm above. The waves climb so high and so fast that they are terrible even to watch. And yet the longer she looks, the more she finds she is grinning out at the water. Silver light plays over the cresting waves and she is hit with the spray over and over  
  
She looks down at her own skin and sees flashes of light beneath the fractured surface. All around her is beautiful, riotous noise and Pike is frozen in the moment of anticipation, caught up in the not knowing: in having no idea if where she stands is safe ground, no idea if she is about to be swept out to sea.  
  
She wakes in her bed at Whitestone already bleeding, a knife sheering through the air for a second strike, and turns to the work at hand.  
  
…  
  
They’ve gotten used to the rhythm of it now. Vox Machina will leave, and she will stay. Because dragons took their cities and now those who remain are full of need, and everyone needs Pike. They’ve learned to compensate for the loss, to grow around her absence. Vex, Keyleth and even Scanlan are becoming better healers every day that they spend without her.  
  
They’ve gotten used to the rhythm of it, and so they can tell when the time is coming without her having to say a word. This time, though, no one is content to let it happen without a goodbye.  
  
Percy deems her ‘intimidating as fuck’ and it is such a relief to have someone say it aloud, to be able to say no and live in the moment after she has said it, to meet Percy’s quiet, understanding gaze.  
  
Scanlan lets her go. Pike has a moment of sharp grief for the version of her who existed only in his mind, shining and unreachable. But she is already breathing easier, and there has been enough loss without mourning those who never existed.  
  
Keyleth leads her away from the others and talks about being confused, and in the moment before responding Pike feels suddenly unarmoured. Once she has been seen there is no going back and perhaps she is not finished being the strong one, maybe she won’t ever be, maybe it is her job to smile and keep them safe and lick her wounds in her own time. Maybe that is what holds this strange, impossible thing together against titans and monsters and all probability. But Keyleth is there and asking and that means it’s already ended, so she says yes, yes, she is confused too, she is confused all the time.  
  
…  
  
Her family are preparing to leave, gathered before the Sun Tree, and Pike is walking away, heading for the temple of Pelor when a lightness takes hold of her, and she has to hold herself back from laughing in the street. Her family are just as confused as she is, every one, and yet they can pull themselves into other realms of existence like its nothing. They can slay monsters that threaten cities, but not one of them can work out what to say or how to say it. People have made themselves vulnerable before her time and time again all because they looked at her, barely three feet tall, named for tricksters and liars, pulling spells out of faith alone, and thought that she was something more than them.  
  
She remembers the words as though she is hearing them for the first time: _be forthright, be grand, burn bright and beautiful, and I shall always be at your side._ She has seen herself reflected in a hundred places: in her friends’ confused hearts; in Grog, smiling and calling her monster; in sailors and healers and agents of war. And perhaps, if she keeps staying, if she keeps giving a voice to her doubts, her friends will begin to do the same.  
  
Standing in the temple she lets the feeling rise, takes hold of her holy symbol, and vanishes into another world.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what I intended this to be when I started, but it ended up being a kind of personal, kind of messy love letter to Pike and characters like her. It's difficult writing finished fic about a relatively unfinished character arc, so thanks for bearing with me. This has been an absurdly long time in the making, so I hope you enjoyed it.


End file.
